Sam Rubin reheasing “Little Bell” (Scene 1)

By Sam Ethan Rubin

My performance began thirteen years ago in a white room. Floor, ceiling, carpet, all white. It had two shelves, out of reach to me. My toys were up there. The only way I could access my toys was to somehow communicate what I wanted.

I knew what I wanted, but I had only a few words then. I was seven. Words got stuck inside my brain. I could not get them into my mouth. But, I could echo back what I heard. That is called echolalia.

Lauren, my helper, brought a refrigerator box into the playroom. It was big. Tall. It dominated the room. But it pleased me to have it there. She lifted me up and put me in it. It was dark inside. I sat down on the bottom of it and looked up. The white ceiling became a blue sky. I could see it. But, I could not point to it. Pointing was something I did not do.

She peeked over the edge and tickled the box from the outside. I stood and traced the sound of her fingers with my fingers from my side of the box. The game pleased me. She said, “Spiders.” I said, “Spiders.” From inside the box, I could feel them walking on the outside.

Lauren banged on the outside. I banged back from the inside. Together, we communicated by drumming on the walls of the box. We created a polysymphonic dissyncopated rhythm. I wanted more of that. That…that…connectedness. Like drawing silk from a worm, Lauren gently pulled.

She cut holes in the box. She looked in. I looked out.

This was the beginning.

Slowly, language came. “Hi! How are you?” “I’m fine. Thank you.” “Will you play with me?” “Yes, I will.”

I moved from the playroom to bigger spaces. The house. A stage.

Four years later, when cast me in A Christmas Carol, I stood in the center of that first stage, alone in the dark before the show on opening night, and pirouetted in a perfect circle, my Tiny Tim cane, an extension of my arm, pointing out, reaching to touch an audience of three hundred that would soon fill the theatre, remembering the playroom where it all began.